The Art of Philip Guston: 1913-1980

Royal Academy, London
24 January-12 April 2004

Philip Guston is one of America's most important
20th century artists. His work occupies a unique place which the
retrospective exhibition now showing at the Royal Academy in London
reveals. If one views a painting such as 'Untitled' (Sandwich, 1980),
independently of his oeuvre, one might experience a strange
contradiction - that of the infusion of authority and strength in
an apparently crude caricature of mundane objects. This fine retrospective
presents the apparent anomalies of unorthodox Guston's career in
such a way that it all makes great sense.

Philip Guston was a childhood friend of Jackson Pollock. Both became
leading artists of the New York School of painters, along with Rothko,
Kline, De Kooning, Newman and Motherwell. The most dramatic point
in Guston's career was his 1970 exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery
in New York where he was seen to betray the dominant genre of abstract
painting, by moving into a courageously personal and highly charged
figuration that acknowledged and paid homage to artists of the past:
Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Goya and Cézanne. With knowledge
of their work Guston produced searing images of American society,
loaded with moral intensity and self-reflection. He presented 20th
century life in its most hideous and extreme form.

'The Art of Philip Guston: 1913-1980' is the most comprehensive
survey of Guston's work in the UK to date. It contains 138 works
including rarely seen drawings from the artist's estate and his
daughter, Musa Meyer's, collection. The exhibition was conceived
and curated by Michael Auping, Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum
of Fort Worth in Texas, where the show began in March 2003 as 'Philip
Guston Retrospective'. It travelled then to the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The
accompanying full colour catalogue (Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth
in association with Thames and Hudson and the Royal Academy, London)
contains excellent scholarly articles by Dore Ashton, Michael Auping,
Bill Berkson, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Joseph Rishel and Michael E.
Shapiro as well as Guston himself.

Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein in Montreal, the youngest
child of Russian émigrés who arrived in Canada shortly
before his birth in 1913. However, Canada, and later America, failed
to fulfil the Goldsteins' dreams of a better life. In Montreal they
lived in what friend Morton Feldman described as 'one of the better
Jewish ghettoes in North America, but a ghetto nonetheless'.1 In
1920, the family moved to Los Angeles but their fortunes did not
improve. Guston's father, Louis, worked as a collector of rubbish
and suffered severe depression. This led to his eventual suicide
by hanging and it was Philip, aged only ten, who found the body.
Philips mother, Rachel, was left to care for and support the
seven children. Guston survived the trauma of his father's suicide
by isolating himself from his immediate family, and by drawing.

His favourite refuge was a large closet illuminated by
a single light bulb. Guston spent hours there in isolation,
inventing cartoons. The light bulb, a multivalent symbol
of Guston's childhood, would show up in many of his later
paintings. By the age of 12, Guston had become a serious
draftsman, and for his 13th birthday, his mother gave him
a year's correspondence course to the Cleveland School of
Cartooning.2

Cartoons were of particular importance, not only in the sense that
children of Guston's generation read comics as today's children
watch TV animation, or play video games, but they also had a political
dimension. Political satire through caricature was an important
aspect of radical thought. Guston had staunch political views, as
examples of his work from the 1960s in particular demonstrate. He
was involved in political activity at school (with his friend Pollock)
and, in fact, was expelled for publishing and distributing leaflets
against the popularity of school sports.

Guston spent a brief spell at art school in LA but found it stifling.
Yet his own path was extremely disciplined and he set himself a
rigorous study of the Old Masters. He always maintained a strong
interest in art history and had a sophisticated and wide-ranging
knowledge of the subject. From an early age he sought to bring the
past and present together. His early works possess a monumentality
and intellectual strength that take one by surprise. Gustons
acquaintance with the work of Picasso and de Chirico, and his interest
in politics gave him an intensely focused ambition. He worked as
a mural artist, under the influence of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego
Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. In 1934, he travelled to
Mexico and worked as an assistant to Siqueiros. The social agenda
shared by these artists was central to Guston's work in the 1930s.

It was in the early 1930s that Guston had his first encounter with
the Ku Klux Klan when some of his paintings were slashed while on
display. Guston's image of the hooded figures of the KKK stayed
with him and informed many of his later artworks. In 1935, Guston
moved to New York to take part in the Federal Arts Project (FAP),
part of Roosevelt's 'New Deal Program'. There, he was one of the
artists funded to paint murals. Class struggle was sometimes alluded
to by the use of children - fundamentally innocent individuals -
fighting with homema de swords against a backdrop of Depression
poverty. His own tragic childhood surely informed the images of
children playing menacing, grown-up games. Surrealism exerted a
profound influence on Guston particularly the disquieting spatial
compositions of de Chirico.

In New York during this period he met Willem de Kooning, Arshile
Gorky, Kline, Rothko and Newman. They formed the nucleus of what
became the Abstract Expressionist movement. The late 1930s also
saw an important shift in Guston's work from mural painting - an
essentially co-operative and public enterprise - to private studio
work. He taught at various places, including St Louis, and was a
charismatic teacher. The Max Beckmann collection was housed in St
Louis and introduced Guston to the intense psychological achievements
of the modern German master. Beckmann's scepticism of society, his
violent moods and the distorted figures were an important source
for Guston. Guston, in turn, enlarged the heads and hands of his
figures and created an insidious claustrophobic mood.

Abstract art was reinvented in New York in the 1940s, and became
a powerful and dramatic force in art. The fact that an artist like
Guston - committed to a social agenda and to the human figure -
could be won over to a non-objective art is testament to the power
and poignancy of the abstract phenomena. Within his dramatic oeuvre
the abstract works are at first anachronistic. Seen in the context
of the present retrospective, Guston's abstract works are eloquent
and beautiful. In 1960, Guston stated:

There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we
inherit from abstract art - that painting is autonomous,
pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually defined
its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'.
It is the adjustment of impurities which forces painting's
continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden.3

Philip Guston made abstract paintings for approximately 16 years,
roughly a third of his career.

For Guston, abstraction was still an experiment, involving
a careful deconstruction in a search for the internal structure
that gives an image its emotional resonance.4

Guston did not subscribe to Clement Greenberg's rigorous formalism,
where metaphysical and spiritual themes are eliminated. Guston viewed
painting as, 'an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is
not what you see I don't know what a painting is; who knows
what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts,
a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with
painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere'.5

Guston himself drew on a broad range of inspiration and was open
to constant change. Abstract shapes enter Guston's pictures such
as 'Tormentors', (1947-1948), a masterful and powerful work in which
the perpetrators of evil in the Nazi death camps 'were best not
literally described, but rather their evil and conflict projected
through undefined forms and abstract presences'.6 The relationship
between figures and objects never disappeared from Guston's world
even though his works were deconstructions of reality. Guston's
abstractions bring together aspects of Rothko, Mondrian and Cézanne.
Michael Auping describes Guston's unique contribution to Abstract
Expressionism as a special immediacy and intimacy, related to touch.

The paintbrush was like a sacred tool to Guston. The nine-inch
long wooden shaft and the flattened horsehairs that protruded
from its end were like an extension of his fingers. Guston
had his pigments ground to create a particularly creamy
consistency, and like thick butter applied to a hard surface,
each stroke subtly squeezed out at its edges, creating a
microsculptural effect.7

Unlike many of the Abstract Expressionists, Guston's abstract works
were comparatively small, 'large in scale if not in size'. He preferred
art books with black and white reproductions in order to appreciate
the structure, the bones of a work of art. When Georg Baselitz saw
Guston's work in Berlin in 1959, he believed they were 'not that
abstract', but a 'distortion of the abstract, full of concrete forms'.
Baselitz was a European 'who appreciated the dynamics of traditional
composition and who was sceptical of the sublimity of abstraction'.8

'The Painter' (1959) is a most significant painting, described
by Aubing as inhabiting 'exceedingly impure territory'. Here abstraction
and figuration meet; he was putting abstraction to the test. A shadowy
hooded figure is visible amid the abstract forms. It was not harping
back to his 1940s figurative paintings but reaching into the future.
In the late 1960s, Guston's work was occupied with the masked figure
and with self-portraits. Guston wanted the open-ended nature of
abstraction, as opposed to figurative images that could not include
illusion and nuance. But, ultimately, abstraction did not satisfy
him. The pulling and pushing of the object in Guston's art is one
of the most compelling aspects of his work.

By 1960, Guston had established an international reputation; he
had taken part in both the Documenta II in Kassel and the Venice
Biennale. In 1967, he moved to Woodstock which became his home.
Guston's philosophical dialogue is a profound and independent one.
His 1960 painting, 'Mirror to S.K' refers to the Danish theologian
Søren Kierkegaard. In line with other philosophers of importance
in Guston's professional and personal development - Friedrich Nietzsche,
Franz Kafka and Albert Camus - Kierkegaard emphasised the darker
side of life and the void lurking beneath. Doubt was a pervading
theme in Guston's work which confronted the essence of the human
predicament in an intense and innovative manner.

During the 1960s, Guston's doubt was directed towards the art world
itself. He rebelled against the prevalent belief of the absolute
purity of non-objective form. 'I got sick and tired of all that
purity I wanted to tell stories!'

Drawing underpins all of Guston's work and gives it an elegant
structure. His knowledge of art history also informs his work so
that a sophisticated dialogue between stylistic formal considerations,
political ideas and autobiographical detail are presented in his
remarkable pictures. Sophisticated ideas with layers of meaning,
numerous references are presented in what at first glance appear
to be crude, cartoon-like imagery. His inventory of grotesque objects
possesses a menacing but authoritative message about the frailty
of human existence.

It was at the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1970, when Guston
was 57 years old, that he effectively reinvented himself as a figurative
artist. His new paintings prompted rage and disbelief; acceptance
only came very slowly. Hilton Kramer was vitriolic, declaring that
a mandarin was pretending to be a stumblebum, a primitive force
triumphing over civilization. With hindsight and with the benefit
of the intelligent curating of this exhibition and the excellent
essays in the catalogue, it is possible to reconcile Guston's radical
departure from abstract art. Joseph Rishel describes the phenomena
thus:

As understandable as the shock of his return to the figure
was in the late sixties, the works from the last decade
of his life now rest comfortably with those that preceded
them. Which is not to rob or diminish the power or novelty
of his creations and their wondrous reflection of a titanic
sensibility. The enigma of the artist (like his definition
of Piero) who wants to stand completely alone while, at
the same time, to find his place in history, should never
be undercut, at the cost of missing the dynamic of Guston's
work.9

'The Art of Philip Guston: 1913-1980', showing now at the Royal
Academy in London, enables us to come to terms with a remarkable
career and to see the unique and important place he occupies in
the broader context of the history of European and American art.